The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A Special Good Talk -- Okay, What Happens Now?

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

He called it quits and now the race is on to see who leads the Liberals to either possible extinction or surprise recovery.

Are you ready for a special Tuesday Good Talk? Of course you are! Coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantal Hébert and Bruce Anderson for a special Tuesday episode of Good Talk. We could not pass this up after the events of yesterday. So let me ask you this to get things started. When I look at my favorite news aggregator in the morning, National News Watch, I look at the list of all the stories on the headlines for all the various stories. And it's quite interesting today. You go from the liberals give themselves three months to save the furniture. With the country under attack, Trudeau leaves it to drift for months. Justin Trudeau resigned too late.

There's no salvaging the Liberal Party now. Trudeau clears the fog. Was Justin Trudeau the Liberals' only problem? We're about to find out. Trudeau's hero, Archtype, helped him until it hurt him. Polyev is the ruler, and he runs the same risk. But my favorite has to be... BC Dairy Queen offers Trudeau resignation specials.

And I tell you, when you're living in Stratford these days and it's minus 10 and there's a couple of feet of snow on the ground, thinking of a BC Dairy Queen is a nice way to get through the day. Okay, let me start with this. And, Bruce, why don't you start us? What did we witness yesterday? Well, I think that the question is, who is we? I mean, I think a lot of people saw something that they felt bittersweet about. I think a lot of people saw something that they were quite happy to see. I think there were a lot of mixed feelings on the part of some people,

depending on how close you were to politics and how much you believed in the virtues of Justin Trudeau as prime minister. But for me, what we saw was sort of the inevitability of politics working the way that it should. It took longer to work out this way, I think, than would have been ideal for the Liberal Party, for the country, and probably for Mr. Trudeau, for that matter. But it did seem inevitable that at a certain point in time, if you're an incumbent head of government and you lose confidence of the voters to the extent that Mr. Trudeau did, that eventually that is going to result in you no longer being in office. The only question is how that's going to happen, whether it's going to happen in an election or

leadership change as is the case now. So in that sense, for me, it's healthy. It's healthy. It's a sign that our democracy functions the way a democracy is supposed to. If the people want something different than what's on offer, they either get to decide to do that in an election campaign or they put pressure on political parties to give them different alternatives than the ones on offer. So I do think that there's a lot of reason for people who are sorry to see Mr. Trudeau go to also say he did a lot of good things. He had a spectacularly good connection with Canadian voters earlier in his time in politics. He,

his agenda was fit for the times and the mood of the times. I think what happened is that over the latter part of his time in office, he lost that connection. He no longer seemed to be able to understand where people were coming from. I think he saw a change in the people around him. I think he made cabinet choices that were not going to help him better understand and navigate the political times. from the everyday lives of Canadians. I think he, some of his kind of personal choices strayed from recognizing that people in Canada like to feel that you should be careful with money, not extravagant with money. I think he interpreted the need to recognize some failures in our society in important ways.

Went about the business of saying we need to reconcile with indigenous people. We need to make amends for things that happened that were inappropriate in the history of the country. In the end, though, it may be that enough of those things accumulated that he and the liberals started to sound sad about the country. And, you know, like many things do happen in politics when one person is in power maybe longer than is ideal, is that all of the weaknesses become part of a caricature. None of the strengths become part of the caricature. And I think that's what happened to Mr. Trudeau.

And I think it was a little bit bittersweet, and this is my last point, to see that even yesterday, as poised and as graceful as his statement was, he seemed to want to lay his choice at the feet of people inside the Liberal Party who weren't happy with him. And I don't know that that's an accurate way of describing what happened. I think people in the Liberal Party tended to stick with him longer than the evidence would have suggested if the party was just following the signals from public opinion. So yeah, it was a very important day and really important to see what happens next.

What's your take on it, Chantal? What did we witness yesterday? I thought it was a sorry sight to watch. Prime Min ministers do not usually resign because they want to, or few of those that I covered actually had the option of staying on and doing great. Jean Chrétien was pushed out slowly, but he was pushed out by his caucus despite the success and resolved that by setting a date for his resignation and avoided a major blow up inside the government that was divided. Brian Mulroney wanted to stay. But I think it was, I looked back at what I saw yesterday, I thought maybe Brian Mulroney was lucky that he led the referendum

on the Charlottetown Accord and lost so resoundedly and got to test the waters and got to see that he wasn't going to be able to have another campaign on him. But both those prime ministers looked in command when they resigned. That's not what I saw yesterday. I didn't find the prime minister's statement particularly grateful. I found it jarring that he would talk about divisions within his party. It's not that the party is so divided.

And on the contrary, by now, there is a consensus inside that caucus and that party that the prime minister had to go. So those are not divisions. We didn't hear the pro-Trudeau camp very much for the past three weeks. Why? Because that camp, even his own voters in Pepinot, we must be doing a good job of informing people because they sounded like pundits yesterday when people, journalists,

went on the streets of Bébino to ask, so what do you think about your MP leaving the prime minister? And basically, the answer was, well, you know, it was obvious that it was time to go, which seems to suggest, despite what the prime minister is saying, that this was obvious to all but him until yesterday. The notion that this biggest regret is not having done electoral reform. God, I wish I'd lived in another galaxy where the prime minister did make a case for his formula for electoral reform forcefully so that he convinced other parties and maybe Canadians that it was the way to go. I don't remember a single speech where he actually advocated for the formula that he said he wanted, but could not get the other parties on side with. It was a weird news conference. And at the end of

the day, you were left with the impression that this is a prime minister that waited so long to see the or worse have ever done by choosing that timing. And you can't fix that. I mean, if you wait too long to do something, you can't take the clock and turn it back. So we will muddle through the next six months and see where we land by the time we go away for the summer, if we go away for the summer this year. But there is no doubt that by waiting so long and doing what he did yesterday, the prime minister has actually made matters worse in all kinds of ways that even his father or Brian Maroney, who left in the last year, the fifth year of a term, did not. And part of

that, of course, is the Trump factor. It's not going to go away. We have two certainties left that were there yesterday, that were there last November. Donald Trump is going to become president and we will have an election this year. Those two things have not changed. But I think we will see a lot of twists and turns between now and then. You want to make a quick point here, Bruce? Yeah. I want to pick up on one thing that Chantal was referring to, which is that what was Justin Trudeau's, how did he treat his party?

And I think that if I had to kind of isolate on one thing that I think he was most lacking at, especially during the recent years of his leadership, is I think he became kind of indifferent to the political interests of his party. I don't think he, I think he immersed himself in the business of government. I think he found maybe politics was kind of tacky or not interesting to him, or he just let other be. He kind of delegated to other people all kinds of decisions about the competitiveness of his political party

and the choices that they made from a cabinet and staff standpoint, even though the evidence kept on mounting that these were choices that weren't working out, I can't recall a situation where a previous leader of the Liberal Party, or any party perhaps for that matter, would have seen themselves lose so much public opinion support without doing a more comprehensive evaluation of what the problem was and how to fix it. So fast forward to yesterday. One thing that he could have done that would have been useful for his party would be in his remarks to acknowledge that maybe the party under his leadership had grown a little bit out of touch or had been a little bit kind of off the mark

with some things that were done and recognized that voters had some legitimate grievances. He didn't do any of that. He didn't sort of acknowledge that there was any mispositioning of him or his government. Instead, he said the problem was the Liberal Party. And I think that, like Chantal, I don't think the problem was the Liberal Party. If anything, the problem for the Liberal Party was that they took too long to force the issue,

despite all of the evidence that they needed to. I'm not blaming them for that. I think that the normal instincts inside a political party need to be that you kind of hold your tongue if you're uncomfortable with things as much as possible. You don't rebel or revolt unless it's absolutely necessary. I think he pushed it past the point where it became absolutely necessary. And then they did what they did. But for me, that's more on him than on them. And it would have been better for him to say the Liberal Party

almost sensed something in the electorate that I wasn't getting, or something that allows a little bit of air to circulate that's useful for the Liberal Party, rather than to say everything was going pretty well, except some people in my party wanted to stab me in the back. And that's clearly the way it came off. Let me just, I don't want to dwell on the past. As Chantel said earlier, there's so much riding on what's in the short-term future. But let me ask just one last question about the past.

And it's as a result of something, Chantel, I heard you say yesterday, which was up until a couple of weeks ago, he wasn't going anywhere. And we could tell that from the Mark Critch interview that he did for 22 minutes, which was up until a couple of weeks ago, he wasn't going anywhere. And we could tell that from the Mark Critch interview that he did for 22 minutes, which was done like literally hours before the Christian Freeland bombshell blew up. And, you know, if that had held true, he wasn't going, he wasn't leaving. Is that what finally did it the the freeland thing is it you know is that what like pushed him over the edge and said okay i gotta go um i talked to a fair

number of liberals over the christmas break i hate to admit it uh that i did break the holiday truce to talk to people and one of the things that we who are not part of parties and political families fail to understand sometimes is how much of a family that actually is. And the word that struck me most in one of those conversations about Christian Freeland's resignation was trauma. That it had been a traumatizing experience for the Liberal government and the Liberal Party to see the breakup of that relationship. It's a breakup that is not on the scale when it comes to political consequences for the country of what happened when Hussein Bouchard broke up with Brian Mulroney. But it is that kind of a breakup. And it will be a problem for Ms. Freeland going forward.

When you think of Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau, or one or the other, you keep having this image of them side by side. That is what we've seen for the past eight or nine years. And the fact that this resignation would come about, that the prime minister would call this number two person in a real sense in his government to say, I don't need you in finance. And even yesterday, hearing Justin Trudeau say

that he was sorry that she wouldn't accept this lead role on the Canada-U.S. fire, when we all know, and he has to know that we know, that Mark Carney turned it down because it was meaningless in the sense that it wasn't a real cabinet position and wasn't tied to any portfolio in any way, shape or form. We can all be appointed Canada US ministers tomorrow. No one is going to give us anything but a limousine and the right to medal in everybody else's business. We're not going to be the Elon Musk of Canada, but almost. So, but that was the last drop, I think. From then on, you cannot survive when your deputy prime minister,

your most loyal frontline minister, quits in the way that she quit, in the circumstances that she did. Because then it goes to what Bruce was talking about, judgment. Respect for what the team brings to you now that you are no longer the person who brings the team to power, which the polls have been showing for months. And by the way, it was just a memory. You guys were all around. I remember MPs crying when Brian Mulroney quit and the party was down in the dumps. I did not see too many of those scenes yesterday after Justin Trudeau announced that he was leaving. Yeah, my answer to that question, Peter, is that it was that event that kind of was the, you know, it was kind of a great beam of light

shining on his miscalculation of his authority and his power within his party. The decision that he made and her response to it encapsulated the fact that he believed that he had the power to make all of the choices on behalf of his party and that everybody was going to go along with it. And that moment had long since passed, I think, you know, and you can see the caucus moving away from him through last summer, through the loss of the, the two important by-elections in Montreal and Toronto. And so to approach the, the winter, thinking that you had still such command of all of the pieces and that you could

make whatever choices you wanted and there would not be any risk of this going badly i think was yet another miscalculation of that kind of balance of power and how much it had changed so it wasn't only that decision but that decision unlocked a lot of pent-up frustration desire for change that otherwise didn't have a an easy rationale to hang on to but that situation with miss freeland gave it all a an easy rationale for people to to to hold on to all right. What our viewers and listeners want to hear is, that's all very interesting, but what the hell happens now? So we're going to try and address that right after this. And welcome back.

You're listening to Good Talk, a special Tuesday episode with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on SiriusXM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us wherever, whatever platform you've chosen. Okay, now what happens? I mean, there's a lot of big decisions that are going to have to be taken

in the next relatively short term. And you see some of the arguments being placed forward. Eddie Goldenberg, Jean Chrétien's former top person saying, you know, they've got to have a new leader by the end of January. Well, if that's going to happen,

that's going to have to happen very fast. And the process of doing that is tricky. So let me open up that vein, first of all, in terms of what happens on the leadership front, who's in, who's out, who's likely to be the leading contender as the race begins. And how are they going to make this decision on who to pick and how to pick a new leader?

If we knew all that, we would be members of a united national council of the Federal Liberal Party. One, we are not, but two, it seems that they're struggling to come to a consensus on the way forward. You saw Eddie Goldenberg yesterday argue for his caucus choice plus, so involving caucus choosing the next leader plus riding presidents. It's kind of the process the party used in the case of Michael Ignatieff, by the way, which was to be ratified later by a vote at a convention,

and that is what happened. But there are caucus members who would actually like caucus to be the driving force in this choice. There are others who are saying, I think Gerald Butts, the former principal secretary to the prime minister is of the school that there must be something larger than a caucus ratified choice to lead the party. But time, God, I mean, this National Council is going to have to meet. They are in the driving seat, technically.

They're going to have to meet and chart a way forward sooner rather than later. So there are, someone put that online yesterday. I didn't check it, but it looked accurate. The shortest time that the liberals over the past decades have taken to pick a new leader was a bit over 100 days when Pierre Trudeau quit and John Turner was selected. There were yesterday 84 days to March 24th, which is when the House will have to come back and open with a speech from the throne. That doesn't mean the party has until March 24 to pick a leader. It means that realistically should have a leader in place early in March at the latest. Why? Because that leader is going to have to, one, get sworn in, two, craft a cabinet,

three, write a throne speech, four, prepare for an election. That won't happen over the weekend before March 24th. So the time frame is basically between today and at best, you know, May 5th or 6th, to be realistic. You mean March, right?

March, yes. Unless you are of the minority school, but it does exist, it says this is all a trick by Justin Trudeau to actually still be there on March 24th presenting that Trump speech and leading the party in an election. I am not part of that small select group of people who buy into that scenario. So what does this mean for people who want to run? One, it's impossible to come to an

informed decision about running unless you know how the party wants to proceed and what the time frame is. There is a limit to going on a suicide mission as a leadership candidate to only lead the party to a catastrophe because you're not given any time to do anything about it. I believe the number of candidates will be a lot smaller than all the picture galleries that we saw with all those portraits yesterday. I think a number of people are going to say, why should I burn my wings in what looks like a Ken Kass mission when I can just wait for someone else to kind of fail and then come in to pick up the pieces afterwards. So the answer to all your questions is we won't know. But I do think that because of Donald Trump coming in on January 20th

with probably things that will make life very complicated on the Canadian side of the border. Candidates that have economic credentials will be preferred over candidates that look like what the federal liberals used to like a decade ago. And it could well be that by the time that choice is made, people like Christopher Freeland and Mark Carney, to name those two, will look like they have an edge because they will have, in one case, the credential of having renegotiated NAFTA,

and in the other, that experience with running the Bank of Canada, but mostly the Bank of the UK over Brexit. And that those credentials will become more interesting and more important to the liberals by mid-February, end of February, than they might look from this distance today. Bruce? Yeah, I think that there are a couple of outstanding questions that need to be resolved and that probably will be resolved this week. The first one is how short is too short? How long is too long for a race? I'm probably more persuaded that what I saw Mark Miller say in an interview with David Cochran yesterday, which is that we should be able to do this.

He meant we in the sense of his party should be able to do this he meant we in the sense of his his party should be able to do this in 30 to 40 days it's a similar amount of time that it takes to have a national election i think he's right about that i think that's probably the right time frame for the party to choose yes it would go against some convention and some language in the Constitution. But I kind of feel like the game of everybody becoming experts in the Constitution of the Liberal Party and not recognizing that there are these escape clauses that allow the party to make choices in unusual circumstances. That's where I've always been, is that they'll decide what they feel is the right thing for their party. The second, so that's the first one on how long a race.

And so I don't think it will be 90 days or anything approaching 90 days. I think it'll be in that chance to vote in this race. And, you know, we heard the prime minister say yesterday in his comments that he wanted a wide open, robust, competitive race where Canadians get to vote. I think he was stating his preference. I don't know exactly where the party is going to end up on that. I think they probably will end up with a race that involves a participation by members of the public. I think that is more consistent with the idea of a party trying to refresh itself

and refresh its connection with people. Obviously, there is some concern. I think that the Liberal Party allowed its rules around who votes and what you need to do in order to qualify to vote to become so loose that the risk of a race being, I don't want to say compromised, but affected by single-issue kind of organizations that want to get people to sign up to participate in this race, not from the standpoint of what kind of Liberal Party do they want to build or what kind of candidate do they want to lead the Liberal Party,

but rather to, you know, give effect to the issues that they care the most about. I think that's a real risk, and I think the party's going to have to struggle with how open or how many days is the membership role of the party if the public is going to vote on it. And on the who runs, I'm where Chantal is, I think, that, you know, it's a good idea for people to see all of the names of all of the possible candidates. But everybody on that list who was in the cabinet yesterday felt a certain way about their role in the party before 11 a.m. After noon, they were more like individuals floating on this kind of sea, uncertain sea that is the Liberal Party. And then it becomes a different kind of calculation.

Do you think that you can have an effective campaign, especially in a compressed time period, if people don't know very much about you? Who else is running and how effective will they be at drawing attention? If you feel like you're going to be towards the back of the pack of five or six people, are you going to be willing to take hard shots at the people who are at the front of that list, knowing that the Liberal Party probably isn't going to enjoy watching a brawl between the leadership candidates. So I think the list probably narrows. I think it might include people like Karina Gould,

and I think she'd be a good candidate. I think Dominic LeBlanc, Chrystia Freeland, and Mark Carney will be kind of up at the top of the list of candidates that are getting attention from liberals across the country. Chantal's point about how do you manifest change if you've been really closely associated with the government is a really important point. But I also am aware that other than Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland, most of the other names aren't known that well to a broad cross-section of Canadians, so there's really more of an opportunity for them to introduce themselves. I didn't mention Mel Jolie because, like François-Philippe

Champagne, there seems to be a little bit more of a sense of maybe that's not a candidacy that will happen this time. I don't know whether that's true or not. Obviously, all of that is speculation at this point. I guess one question that people who aren't concerned with the fate of the Liberal Party would be asking themselves is, how effective can a government be if the finance or the foreign affairs ministers, or both at this juncture, are also campaigning for the leadership of the party. How does that make sense? My understanding and my memory tells me that ministers did not walk away from cabinet during leadership campaigns in the past. But do we seriously believe that after January 20th, we want the current finance minister, Dominique Leblanc, to be hosting breakfast with liberal members and preparing for leadership debates, as opposed to being focused 100% on his job. Same with foreign affairs minister, Mélanie Joly. I also believe the Liberal Party has a tradition of alternating between Francophone and Anglophones. And the name Le Blanc doesn't sound like white to me.

Translation from Blanc, the color. So on that basis, I'm not convinced that he, Mélanie Joly, or François-Philippe Champagne actually should not skip that turn. A few words about the leadership roles. And no, I am not an expert in the liberal constitution, except that I do know there are enough escape clauses for basically the national executive to craft that process in a way that suits the circumstances. And that is as it should.

But my understanding is that if you are someone from the public that want to participate in this process, and the process is as short as Mark Miller suggested, you're not going to because my understanding is you have to have gone through the steps to become a voter in the leadership process 41 days before that vote. So here we are. If we're going to have a 40-day campaign, whoever is a member now or is registered now is actually whoever gets to vote in a wide open vote of the membership. There has also been this notion that the party, the Liberal Party, is primed for taking by lobby groups who will sign up en masse to kind of decide who the next leader is based on foreign interest or whatever you want. OK, so let's be serious here. The Liberal Party, like the Conservatives and as opposed to the NDP, calculates leadership points for riding. So each riding weighs the same. If you really want to take over the Liberal Party,

you have to be really organized because you need to control the Nunavut riding and the Drummondville area in the same way as the ridings around Mississauga or around Vancouver. You cannot just pack up five or six ridings and think you're going to have a determining outcome, a way in that balance. I went through all of the results, writing for writing, of the recent conservative leadership vote, which was very well attended. And I looked for, you know, the writings where there were groups that were said to have maybe had an interest in influencing the outcome. One, I could find no evidence that they, Pierre P owed his victory to any of those groups, but I could also find no evidence that there was enough be really, really ready to invade one of those two political parties to be efficient.

So I read all this, but I think let's test that in the reality of this process. It's not as easy as people who are saying this is going to happen make it sound. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead. as people who are saying this is going to happen make it sound okay i agree with that i think sorry go ahead but make it quick because there's a couple other areas i want to get in go ahead i i think chantal's right that the um that the risks uh intended to be kind of exaggerated that there i i do believe that probably in the case of the conservative leadership, the pro-life movement was able to assemble significant numbers of voters in a lot of different ridings across the country. But I don't think that we're really talking about the same kind of challenge in terms of the risks facing the Liberal Party in this process, in part because it's short, but in part because I think the issue set that might motivate that participation tends to be a little bit more regionally concentrated and therefore less likely to have that big impact. So I think on balance, the party probably will end up in a

process where members are allowed to vote. And that's probably the best choice in terms of the positioning of the party and the engagement with voters. Okay. Chantal mentioned the French-English rotation issue, which has always been a part of the Liberal Party's, you know, decision-making process over the years in terms of its leader. Let me ask another question that's related to that. And that's the man-woman thing. The Liberals have never had a female leader.

The Conservatives, as we know, have had one who was Prime Minister for a couple of months, not chosen by the people, but chosen by the party. This will come up, I already see it coming up, certainly in the mail I get, and I'm sure you've heard it around as well, as to whether the liberals are going to take a step in that direction at a time when this continent, especially with the exception of Mexico, has given, you know, the back of the hand to female candidates,

did with Hillary Clinton, did with Kamala Harris. And are the liberals positioned to make a choice along those lines at all? Well, if I were a female minister or former minister who was looking at this, I would not want to become the liberals Kim Campbell. And that is what the proposition on the table is. This notion that the liberals will have bragging rights to becoming the last major federal party to have a female leader, but in exchange that female leader will get crushed and then replaced. Me, I would hold my fire and wait until after the election

to see where the dust settles. I would run in that election, but I wouldn't go any further. And talking about possible female candidates, I understand that the former BC Premier, Christy Clark, is interested in the job, which I find fascinating in the sense that it's really hard to become a federal prime minister, no matter what your experience is, if you're showing up on training wheels months before an election. But my second point is, word to Miss Clark, who is apparently learning French, the days when having the goodwill of learning that second language

was good enough for any voter in Quebec are long gone. So unless she can debate with Yves-François Blanchet on a somewhat equal footing, which is the case for Pierre Poilier, for instance, she should probably stick to the French classes for a while longer rather than waste her time in a leadership campaign. Can I say anything on this, Bruce? Yeah, I don't think this is going to be a leadership race that's heavily influenced by do we want a woman or do we want a man as leader?

I say that for a few reasons. One is I think that the, and I know there are people who think that the U.S. elections were a rejection of female as president. And I've never really I'm sure that's part of the of what happened. But I don't think that that's necessarily the kind of the big story there. But here, I don't think that in the Liberal Party anyway, it doesn't seem to me that there are real barriers to the idea of a woman becoming leader. Now, I say that with a great deal of hesitation being a man and understanding that there have historically always been significant barriers to women achieving leadership

roles in politics. But I think it is to Justin Trudeau's credit that he established this idea of a gender balanced cabinet. It is to his credit that he appointed the people who he thought were the best able to fill senior roles in government, including the foreign affairs portfolio and the finance portfolio and the role of deputy prime minister. He appointed women to those roles. So I don't think the Liberal Party looks like a place where women can't run and have a chance of success. But the Liberal Party is some 16 points behind the Conservatives among women, and more like 26 points behind among men. And so if the Liberal Party has a problem connecting on a gender basis right now, it's much more evident to me that that is with men rather than with women.

And so I don't think that there will be a significant kind of amount of energy within the party leadership process around that. It's time for a woman to be prime minister of Canada, especially knowing that the term before an election happens might be extremely short. And so, you know, what they're really going to be trying to do is pick somebody that they think can win an election and is best in touch with the challenges that the party faces with the electorate right now. So unlike the Liberal Party to look for somebody who they think can win.

That's not what they're built for. But the thing is, at this point, with a short, and I don't want to take a hit on pollsters, but the problem with a short campaign is that if the Liberals look at polls, which I think are offering fool's gold on this, they will say, well, you know, Christia Freeland comes first. Although when you look at the impact on voting intentions, she still leads the party to a best third place. But it's based on also notoriety. I remember those polls when Ken Dryden was running against Michael Ignatieff, Bob Brie and Stéphane Zion. The Star published a front page poll showing Dryden was the favorite with voters. Well, that's because Ken Dryden was well liked by people.

He came nowhere near winning that leadership. I'm not sure that the outcome was bad for the Liberal Party. So in this particular instance, I think the Liberals are going to have to think long and hard about not how they feel this morning, but how Canadians will feel come March 24th. I think that's right. They're going to have to look south of the border.

We are not in the usual time when a prime minister goes and then you seek a woman because maybe she's going to reconnect with women. That's the Kim Campbell scenario. It didn't work out very well. That's not where we are. We are in a place where the best choice is going to be who people feel will look best to manage an existential economic crisis in three months. I agree with that completely. My point was really more that don't, not that the Liberal Party should

pick a man because they're more behind among men. It's that the idea of a gender choice of a woman feels kind of not touching on the central issues of the moment, which are really what is going to decide how the Liberal Party is positioned going into the next election. And men or women, women who want to run should assess whether it's a good time for them to run, not whether it's a great time for the liberals to send a message to women. They should make that decision on the same cold-blooded fashion as any guy would, because that's how you advance, not by saying, I'm going to serve the cause by being the woman on the ballot

or we need a Quebecer and a woman and this and that. The liberals have done that in the past to have a good leadership lineup. I don't believe we are in those circumstances. So if there is a woman there that thinks she can do better on the election front and on the government front than any of the men who are running, sure, go ahead. That's how guys decide. There is no obligation on women to feel that they should wear a flag for gender. Okay.

I mean, you know, earlier you mentioned, Chantal, you know, the various articles that we've seen already in the last 24 hours of all the potential candidates. And when you look at that list and you look at those pictures, at least half of them are women who are known, well-known political figures in the country because of their cabinet positions, you know, and whether it's Friedland or Jolie or Christy Clark, the former premier, Anita Anand, You know, the list goes on. There's pretty significant names in there, in that field.

We've got to take our final break. When we come back, what I want to talk about is how those significant names, no matter their gender, how they place themselves in these next couple of days, because for most of them, the problem is going to be how do they separate themselves from all the pictures that exist of them standing beside Justin Trudeau when you know what the opposition is going to be saying about that. We'll be back right after this. Welcome back.

Final episode or final segment of Good Talk for this special edition on this Tuesday. We'll still be here on Friday as well with Bruce and Chantel. Thursday, by the way, your turn. If you have thoughts on this story in any fashion, get them in to me at the MansbridgePodcast at gmail.com. Keep it short. Include your name and the location you're running from. Okay, how do these names, all of them, including Mark Carney, who did sign on with the Trudeau Liberals

in the last year or so in an economic role of some kind. How did these various candidates separate themselves from the Trudeau record? It's easier for some than others, but they all have a degree of that. And can they do that? We've got about five minutes left. Bruce, you start. Well, I think it is going to be harder for people who've been in the cabinet, not because they don't see the need to do it, but because the language to do it with is going to be harder for them to find and articulate with some with some force.

That may be more true for Ms. Freeland than than others. But I don't think it's really the central issue. I mean, I think that there is going to be a degree to which people, voters who might consider the Liberal Party, and our polling shows that 16% of voters say, I won't consider Liberals if Trudeau's the leader, but I might if he's not. So there's 16 points of potential public opinion that opened up. Now,

there's a lot of gap between potential and reality. But what that tells me is it isn't necessarily everything about the liberal record that those voters need to hear disavowed. It's more, I just want to hear a different voice. I want to hear somebody who's got a different direction. And I think that's where the competition should be most intense rather than to how different can you sound from justin trudeau and second part of that is how different will you sound from pierre polliev and in what ways will you sound different from pierre polliev that is probably the competition that the liberals should try to put on for voters to see. And you can make the case, and some will, that people who are experienced in politics have the chops,

have the reps, know how to make the case against Pierre Polyev, and somebody from the outside might not. I, on the other hand, make the case that nobody in the cabinet has been doing a fantastic job so far of prosecuting the case against Pierre Polyev. Many of the things that they try sound rote, sound manufactured, sound a bit kind of performative, and in the end haven't really worked. And so liberals, I think, are going to be looking for someone who can take the fight to Pierre Polyev. And I did notice, and I'll finish on this point because I know we're running out of time, that Pierre Polyev's response to yesterday's events kind of continued the pattern of,

does he look like he can be the bigger man? Can he rise to an occasion that might call for just a phrase or a sentence of something that feels kind of graceful. Thank you for your service. And the answer is he wasn't that guy yesterday, and I think he is somewhat vulnerable in an election where people are not preoccupied with getting rid of Justin Trudeau. He's somewhat vulnerable to criticism about his economic positioning and his fitness for the geopolitical and economic context

that Canada finds itself in right now. Chantal. I believe the ballot box leadership question should be who can take on not only Pierre Poiliev, but Donald Trump. Who can best do that? I go back to a video of Stephen Harper that I saw a few months ago in a private meeting with voters where he was saying the thing that is most wrong about the Trudeau government is not that they've done this and that and that. It's that they are not serious people. And I believe serious is the key word here, that liberals should be looking for the person

who looks like the adult in the room and the serious person and not for the gimmicky style. Pierre Poilievre is going to take away everything that you have and he's going to bring back abortion restrictions. I don't think a campaign like that will serve the liberals or that it's relevant to the current conversation or the conversation we'll be having in a month from now. So whether that makes all those interesting ministers

who seem to be, as Bruce says, dishing out lines like those that I just talked about, prime leadership material, I don't know. I also think that notwithstanding what Mr. Goldenberg had to say yesterday about Chrystia Freeland and how she broke away from Trudeau with her resignation letter, if I were the Conservatives, I would know that I have hours of material of Chrystia Freeland cheering on Justin Trudeau to the bitter end every single step of the way. So one resignation letter does not erase all of that. Quick last question.

People love at times a surprise, for a surprise to happen. Could be in a sporting event, could be in a political event. Could there be a surprise here? Well, with people like our underdogs, me, I'm more curious about the election campaign with a new liberal leader than about the liberal leadership and surprises.

I don't really see great surprises or discoveries on the way to the leadership vote. But in an election in the past, every change election has brought to government an opposition leader who was the underdog. It was a great success story going from nowhere to somewhere. This time, the opposition leader is starting 20 points ahead and the underdog is going to be the incumbent.

And I'm curious to see how that plays out. If there's a surprise to happen, it will probably happen because of what Chantal mentioned, which is the Trump factor. He's very unpredictable and he could create a dynamic in the conversation in Canada that nobody can really exactly see coming, but for which the politics around it could be extremely important. I think that's a really good observation, and one we should keep in mind,

because he certainly has the potential to do that. All right, we're going the potential to do that. All right. We're going to leave it at that. Even though Larry is basically trading Canada to Trump in exchange for TikTok or something like that today, I'm not sure exactly how that deal is going to work. We'll see. We'll make it work.

Okay. We'll leave it at that. We will see both of you again on Friday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. Talk to you again soon.